AMI, AMR, and Metering Features

Earlier this month, American Water, the largest, most geographically diverse investor owned water and wastewater utility in the U.S., played an active role in the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners’ (NARUC) 127th Annual Meeting,* which was held in Austin, TX.

Russellville water treatment plant is a surface water plant using traditional clarification, filtration, and treatment. The plant historically has used traditional contact turbidimeters that employ tungsten lamps that required quarterly maintenance, but replaced their turbidimeters with Swan Turbiwell turbidimeters in 2012. Read the full report for a comparison of the performance of the Swan Turbiwell to the previously installed turbidimeters.

With a 2,400 square mile service area and approximately 40,000 customers to serve in southeastern Illinois, EJ Water Cooperative was having difficulties scheduling the nearly 4,000-mile monthly drive to complete a meter reading cycle. The rising cost of their aging system and the need to reduce operating costs prompted the search for a new meter reading system.

Deeply nestled in the state of Iowa’s capital city, Des Moines Water Works (DMWW) is ranked one of the nation’s best-operated water systems for continuously meeting the high expectations and future needs of its customers and municipal governments.

The City of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, had been using a drive-by Automatic Meter Reading (AMR) system to read all of its meters since 2010, but according to Rob Stark, utility supervisor for the City of Coeur d’Alene Water Department, it wasn’t realizing the full benefits with its existing system.

For the Village of Lombard’s Water Division, consistently delivering high-quality tap water to the community’s nearly 44,000 residents and the businesses serving them was once quite a juggling act: constantly fixing old, temperamental analyzers; feeding reagents into the old analyzers; and staying ahead of callers complaining about “musty” water tastes and odors. Not today.

The water meter industry operates on revenue and the modern utility is both a business and a public service. This article deals with the business and revenue side of the water industry. I don’t question the ability of the modern water utility to produce safe, high-quality water. However, I am concerned about the service side, since fairness to the end users of our product and fairness to the utilities who produce this very high-quality product is important and closely related to the revenue issues. It is our job to collect the revenue to which we are entitled by the application of fair business practices and the use of accurate and cost-saving measurement devices. I will talk about building revenue by avoiding revenue loss. By Floyd S. Salser, Jr., CEO, MARS Company